About the Company

Intermountain Healthcare, a not-for-profit health system that includes hospitals, clinics, and health insurance plans, needed to optimize and automate its IT infrastructure to reduce costs and better collaborate to quickly create and launch innovative patient services. With Red Hat® solutions, Intermountain reduced IT deployment time from 2-3 weeks to about 4 hours, cut IT costs by migrating to open source software, and improved cross-team DevOps collaboration.

The path to success

Challenge: Support innovative patient care

Intermountain Healthcare’s proprietary IT environment made making changes a complex process, and provisioning delays hindered development work. Also, proprietary hardware and software added licensing and other IT costs. The group sought a more agile, flexible solution that would simplify its IT environment and improve costs. “The community sees Intermountain as a partner, someone they rely on for the best healthcare at an appropriate cost,” said Bret Lawson, director of infrastructure and operations at Intermountain Healthcare.

Case study

Solution: Migrate to open source solutions

Intermountain turned to Red Hat, its long-time, trusted technology partner, for help designing and deploying a new open source environment using virtualization and management solutions. “When we did a proof of concept against proprietary solutions, we found Red Hat CloudForms to be a lot more flexible,” said Paul Strader, supervisor of open system engineering at Intermountain. “In fact, we gained the same functionality as our existing proprietary software, which took a year to get running properly, in just 3 weeks.” Intermountain also used Red Hat solutions to streamline its patient portal and simplify its messaging interfaces. To support this software, the group switched from its proprietary hardware to cost-effective Intel-based processors.

Software & services

Hardware

Cisco UCS B200 M4 Blade Server

Dell PowerEdge R630 High-Density and Performance 2S/1U Rack Server

Intel Xeon E5 v3 processors

Results: Build agile, cost-effective IT—for patient savings

With agile, easy-to-use technology from Red Hat, Intermountain’s teams can provision their own virtual machines (VMs), and container technology has reduced the need for time-consuming custom deployments. As a result, deployment time has decreased from 2-3 weeks to about 4 hours, and VM provisioning time has improved from 3 days to just 20 minutes. Also, by migrating to open source software, Intermountain has drastically reduced its IT costs—including licensing and staffing costs. “Our Intel and Red Hat solution has helped us reduce costs while still getting the availability, power, and performance that’s required in a clinical environment,” said Lawson. In addition, Intermountain’s new, flexible environment supports collaborative DevOps work.